The Priest of Blood

by Douglas Clegg

  We barely spoke a word between us, but it did not matter. I could have lain with her, pressed my flesh to her greedy mouth for an eternity. The silence without was broken by the richness I experienced within my soul. I saw great cities of vast kingdoms that I had never before seen. I had visions of creatures that swam beneath the sea, monstrous but beautiful beasts, and of a woman who wore a shroud of darkness and a gold mask on her face. I saw this woman who held me as she sucked at my blood, but many centuries earlier, sitting within a temple on a cliff’s edge, with cracks in the earth below her stone seat, and the mist of gases coming up.

  With these visions, I learned her name—she was called Pythia, and I saw her differently in my mind while she drank from me. I saw her surrounded with serpents at her feet, wearing a long tunic that barely covered her, her breasts exposed, gold around her neck and arms, shaped also as snakes. Behind her, a statue of a man who wore a diadem that was like the sun itself. It was a pagan temple, and she was a priestess of some kind. In the vision, she began to move as if in a dance, but a dance as I had never before seen. It was erotic, then, by turns, vulgar, and I wondered if, in this vision, she was a temple harlot or a great leader. I could not tell. But the feeling I had while watching her was of ecstasy.

  And then, when my mistress had drunk her fill of me for the night, and I felt the swoon of dawn arrive, the visions and the wonderful pleasure eroded. We lay together, entangled, I with my straps and ropes to keep me safe or trapped, and she with her cold flesh pressed against me, my lover, my murderer. There, I held her as the day wore on beyond the walls of my tower.

  I forgot my past, I forgot my mother’s fire and the Great Forest of my childhood, forgot the Barony and even my Alienora. Forgot my brother, and dear Thibaud, and my companion Ewen, who had been with me through so much of my youth. All of them became a dream that I had been told.

  For all I knew I had been a slave to this woman named Pythia my whole life, from birth. She was all that mattered. I was nothing. I was less than nothing. I was beneath the contempt of the lowest creature. My only offering was the blood that flowed through me. If it sustained her, and brought her joy, that is why I lived. If she took pleasure from me, it was more than I could have expected. Sleep came or did not come for me. Sometimes, I lay there, a long endless day without light, and yet knowing that the sun rose high beyond this tower prison.

  Night came slowly, with pain in my joints as I began to desire her mouth to my throat, or the warmth of her spit along my forearm, and that pressure from her sharp teeth just before my skin gave way to the razor edge. If I could not feel her feeding against me, I would choose death. During the day I might feel self-revulsion, but come the evening, I would want only her and serve only her and be what she wanted me to be for her. She was my all. She was my reason for continuing to live.

  My life force waned, yet I wanted nothing from life.

  “It is the blood,” she whispered to me as she sucked the sweet nectar from my neck, now unshaven and bristling with several days’ growth of beard. She spoke inside my mind, as if we were not separate, but bound as spirits.

  She told me: While you live, you are mine, you are my love, you are the dirt of my grave, you are the flesh that is my bed.

  Her presence flowed through my mind, through my memory, wanting to know of every adventure and thought that had ever come to me. Yet nothing seemed to be there—my thoughts were shadows in a cave of darkness.

  I felt myself evaporate against her vibrating form—her teeth moved back and forth, sawing into me, tasting the fresh, newly made blood.

  And then, one night, she did not return to me.

  8

  I lay there, craving her, knowing that she had abandoned me to death itself. Willingly, I would die. I was diseased, I had the plague, I was poison itself, no longer blood in my body. I’d become a repository for some deadly liquid within my flesh. She found me disgusting, judged me unworthy, despised me—I felt all of this.

  I lay there, weak as a newborn or as a man of nine hundred years. I tried to dream of her face and the feel of her upon me, using me, but I had nothing.

  I lay that day, staring at the stones around me, wondering at my tomb, at my last moments of life. Yet I remained alive by nightfall. Just as I felt myself slipping from life, a dryness to my throat and a dislocation from my body, I saw her before me—a vision of unholy beauty. She had returned! Joy and hope for another night of bleeding brought the flicker of life to my pallid flesh.

  “You are dying,” she whispered to me, her lips near my ear. “But I have loved you for nearly one full moon, and I taste something within you that I do not want to send to the Threshold. Would you live as a monster, or die as a man?”

  I tried to speak, but I had no words. Yet, she heard my thoughts.

  “You will feel the pain of death. It is like a thousand needles, and within each prick of their dagger points, a thousand more emerge,” she said, her voice like a mother whispering a lullaby to a feverish child. “It will stop up your heart and take the wind from your chest. You will have a fear that all mortals have at death, and you will not think that you will ever return here or into the world beyond the Threshold. But do not fear. Let death take your mortality from you. Let it have its due. What I will bring into being is a third being, between you and me, our child, and the child will be in you, and will be you. You will be the father of the child and the son, as well, and he will be you, yet he will not be you. Give me your breath, and take mine from me.”

  Instead of pressing her teeth into me, she put her lips to mine. I expected to feel the needles of her teeth, but instead she parted my lips with her tongue, and I felt a rush of air. A hot wind entered into my mouth, and forced its way down my throat. It felt as if invisible spiders scurried down across my tongue, along the moist tissues at the back of my throat. It was not simply breath alone, for something in it made me see her more clearly as it entered my lungs. This was some new ether that she had, and it began to revive me. I could not resist, and pushed at her because I feared it, but I had no strength.

  My eyes went wide as I felt the burning at my lungs. She had set me afire within. I felt terror that I would incinerate from this heat.

  She held me more tightly than I had ever been held—it was like bondage to another. I closed my eyes—feeling the submission to her, to her will, and suddenly a vision came at me in a lightning flash, all at once, perfectly made, every detail:

  A man in priest’s robes, with a staff in his hand upon which snakes entwined. An altar behind him, on which Pythia lay in royal splendor. We were in a great temple of some primitive civilization. And there was another—a woman whose face was covered with a terrible gold mask, a mask with a face upon it of some monstrous creature.

  The priest said to me, “Alkemara.”

  I felt as if I were set on fire, tied as my mother had been, to the stake, with thorny kindling wrapped about my ankles.

  The serpents that moved slowly along the staff he held suddenly became an encircling vine, and a small purple-blue flower opened from the rounded leaf of the vine.

  The priest held an iron gaze upon me, as if searching within me for something he had been seeking for many years. He was a gaunt creature, with dark, reflective eyes. His scalp and face were shaven and covered with tattoos savage and barbaric. He had rings through his ears and nostrils, and where his robe opened, I saw rings along his chest as well. His fingernails were long and gently curved, thick and yellow. His robe was gold and red and black and, beneath the great moon above, it shone with a silver light along the sleeves of it.

  When he spoke, his teeth shone black and shiny as if carved from some translucent dark stone and thrust into his gums. His eyes were black as night—no white to the eye, nor color. And yet for all this, he was a handsome presence, a powerful man. He had the look of a pagan leader, and when he held the staff aloft, I knew its name as if it held magick in its very wood.

  It was the Staff of the Nahhashim, and I heard st
range whispers coming from it, as if invisible spirits surrounded it.

  As he stood before me in this burning vision, great dragon wings unfolded behind him, obscuring the altar. I remembered the demon that had been brought up from the well within the Great Forest. This priest had the same wings. They were leathery and slick like eelskin, but with great bony prongs that thrust out from the skin as the wings came to their full spread behind him, each finger of the wing ending in a bony talon.

  I saw shadows, the ones who whispered the word Nahhashim, and all around the priest, there were other figures of men, but made purely of darkness. Another word they whispered, “Maz-Sherah.”

  The priest might have been the worst demon from Hell, with his great wings spread and those terrible shades of the dead all about him, whispering. Still, I trembled not at the sight of him, but these other shadows struck me with a nameless fear.

  The priest spoke within me, not with words of a strange language, but with a tongue of fire that spoke his words back through me, back into the mouth I had forgotten even existed—

  “The Myrrydanai know of you from the breath. Already, they seek to destroy the All. The dark mother herself smells your flesh and blood. She will pursue you. Still, you must come. The Nahhashim await. The Kamr await. You must bring the vine and the flower that I might know you.”

  Pythia’s lips closed. I exhaled into her, and she drew away.

  The vision, gone. The priest, no longer in my thoughts. Yet it was as if he were there with the two of us in that tower. The last of his words were like ghosts, haunting me.

  I spoke his words, in that ancient tongue that was unknown to me, and although I did not then understand their meaning, the words I remembered were Alkemara, Lemesharra, Medhya, Merod, Myrrydanai, and Nahhashim.

  The look on Pythia’s face was one of terror. It was the first I had seen her without a look of power or of deceit.

  I knew at that moment what she knew.

  The vision had been within her, and somehow, when she passed the breath to me, I had drawn it from her soul as if drawing water from a deep well.

  Something within it brought dread to her visage, and she was no longer my mother, my goddess, my lover, my child, my mistress.

  She was a vampyre, one of the foul demons of which I’d been warned, and she fell backward when she heard the words.

  “No!” she screeched. She rose, her face still stricken. From her shoulders, dragon wings unfurled. I had not seen them before on her. They emerged from her back as she arched it, and suddenly, like the wings on that priest, they were at full span behind her.

  She rose slightly from the ground, the great wings moving in a slow wave through the still, fetid air.

  I suppose she wished to kill me then, but something stayed her hand. For the first time, I felt what all vampyres feel—it is called the stream, the connection between these creatures and their prey.

  I had begun to feel that sense of otherness. I had begun, by inhaling the burning breath of Pythia, the journey toward death.

  I lay back, unable to defend myself if she chose to slaughter me there. I experienced a winter’s coldness invading my body. Then it became like razors of ice cutting from inside my flesh, pushing outward.

  At last, I thought. I am dying. I am going to experience the end of all. Whether my soul went toward Heaven or Hell, I had no care. Whether devils or angels had won the fight for my soul, what did it matter? Better to be in an eternity of torture that had purpose to it than the life I had led. The memories of life did not flood back as I went. I tried to grasp at something as I felt my life force leaving my body. I tried to remember those I had forgotten. My mother—what had she looked like? I could remember the smell of her fire, but not her face. My brother Frey, what was the last he had said to me? I could not recall. Would I see him in the afterlife? Would I meet any I had cared for there? Would I burn in the eternal fires of Hell? Yet even these last thoughts made no sense to me as I felt winter overtake my flesh.

  At the last I saw a brief spark of blue, as if a match had just been lit, only it hadn’t quite caught its flame.

  A heavy darkness dragged me down into its hole, and everything I saw began to vanish in the valley of the shadow of Death. I smelled something that was like the memory of a rose—a scent so smothering and yet mild that I felt happy to go pursue its trail. The journey through death—candles being snuffed as if they were lit within me. My fingers lost the last of their tingling, and a heaviness turned my limbs to stone. A pressure grew in my chest. My mind had already begun to move with the swiftness of falcons into a darkness so deep that it began to turn light again and yet was neither light nor dark, night nor day, and a thousand colors grew as my body turned to ice.

  And then I died out, the last of the flame.

  I awoke three nights later.

  BOOK TWO

  ________________

  IMMORTALITY

  PART 1: VAMPYRE

  Chapter 11

  ________________

  RESURRECTION

  1

  My mortal life had ended in that tower with the creature, the vampyre, taking the last of my life’s blood and giving me the breath of the life of immortal damnation. How many years and centuries have passed since that moment! The city of my rebirth is buried in sand, while other towering citadels have risen and fallen, like sandcastles in a sweeping tide, built, destroyed, rebuilt, undone. Time itself changes with the first resurrection—for days become as minutes, and years, hours.

  Mortality is a brief flickering of a lamp in a drafty room. The immortal existence is the fire that spreads in the wind, across dried grasses and dying villages. It destroys and seduces, it is the furnace of eternity within the figure of the lone creature: the man who arises from the dead.

  Hunger and thirst seem amplified upon awakening.

  The mind itself grows, expands, and encompasses more than the mortal mind ever could. Empathy grows, as well as a monstrous understanding of the prey and the dance it must perform with the predator.

  But the first thing a newly risen vampyre feels is the shock of remembering the journey to death, to the Threshold itself. The return into flesh is an unwelcome journey.

  Death is a whisper, an echo, but life is a tearing, ravaging imbecile, drawing one back to the flesh, back to the nerve and sinew and the beating of the heart.

  Back to the blood itself.

  2

  I lay in a deep, open grave.

  Above me, darkness.

  I caught my breath as one who comes up from the sea after nearly drowning, and grasped for whatever I could—dirt and rocks beside me—to sit up so that the burning in my lungs would cease. I leaned forward, clutching my knees to my chest. I was naked. Beside me, my tunic, cloak, and sword.

  Someone had brought me to this place. From the tower to this home of death.

  My lips were parched. I felt old beyond my years. I had only a slight memory of a dream—and as I gained clarity in my consciousness, I realized it was not a dream at all but the vision that Pythia had compelled me to have. The same vision that had frightened her so, though I knew not why.

  The priest, with his eyes of shiny beetle blackness, and the figures in red and black and yellow that were painted upon his clean-shaved scalp, the small gold and jeweled rings that covered his earlobes and dotted his nose at either nostril.

  “The Myrrydanai know of you from the breath,” the priest whispered. “Already they seek to destroy the All. The dark mother herself smells your flesh and blood. She will pursue you. Still, you must come. The Nahhashim await. The Kamr await. You must bring the vine and the flower that I might know you. “

  I opened my eyes, and looked up.

  Closed again, I saw the priest from the vision. The words whispered to me, Nahhashim. Alkemara. Lemesharra. Merod.

  And then I saw another figure in shadow, like a shroud, and I knew it was a woman and she held her arms out to me and I felt a terrible ice from her, and, beside her, dancing sha
dows, and a whispering sound as of bats in a cave as they fly into the night. The priest’s voice grew louder in my head, She knows you are near.

  I opened my eyes to darkness. The whispering in my head stopped. I began to see clearly through the dark. Far above me, another passageway. I had looked down upon these graves when I had wandered Hedammu looking for Thibaud. I had felt as if I were on the edge of a precipice then. Now I was in the pit below. In some home of the dead.

  I sensed someone nearby, although I could not then say how I felt the presence of another. No sound met my ears. I saw nothing as I looked upward.

  I tried to rise, but my legs were too weak, and I collapsed.

  Then the rush of wind, nearly howling above me, as if a door had been opened to a sandstorm outside.

  Whispering above me.

  Then the sound of a muffled scream.

  A large bundle flew down to me from above.

  I scooted backward.

  The bundle: a maiden, completely bound head to foot with rope.

  She stared at me in terror. Her face was white as milk, and she had open wounds along her shoulder and throat, as if a wolf had attacked her. Had Pythia already drunk from her? My heart beat fast, thinking of Pythia and of her ministrations to my own throat.

  I wanted to lift the maiden up, but not for protection. I didn’t see a woman’s face so much as I began to see what ran beneath it: a dark, delicious elixir that was like fine wine and clear, pure water—the blood itself.